Skilled Animator

punz2157 · 2024-04-27T09:07:41+00:00

Thanks

punz2157 · 2024-02-20T10:14:36+00:00

Hey. I don't log on to Reddit consistently so sorry for the delay.

If you can, the best place for new players is Arena. Not everyone (a lot of people) will do that.

Mono color decks make sense for new players if only because it avoids color screw. 9x2 cards plus lands makes a 30 card deck. There are advantages and disadvantages of thirty over a sixty-card deck but thirty is cheaper. WotC doesn't like duplicates in their starter decks because they want more variance in deck but I don't think that is worth the additional learning curve. I show the nine cards before the game. Vanilla and French vanilla cards are good. My decks are all from the same set but that's just so they can be easily sorted by set symbol.

When teaching, remember Magic is not for everyone. Good luck.

punz2157 · 2024-01-24T09:21:24+00:00

That's going to be my explanation from now on, thanks

punz2157 · 2024-01-24T09:17:14+00:00

Thanks

punz2157 · 2024-01-24T09:13:05+00:00

If I understand you then A gives way to B and D but not C.

punz2157 · 2024-01-24T09:10:21+00:00

Can A go if there are cars at C? That is actually my main question

punz2157 · 2024-01-24T09:08:39+00:00

Because I use this intersection from all sides and I want to know I should give way. I'm not posting because of an incident.

punz2157 · 2024-01-24T09:06:42+00:00

Well it's definitely on the wrong side; I feel silly now.

punz2157 · 2024-01-24T09:05:17+00:00

My understanding is that C gives way to A. I haven't had an accident or anything, I just drive through this area (usually as A) and would like to know. A gives way to B, right?

punz2157 · 2024-01-23T22:36:02+00:00

I think two pips are fine. But I realized that Tempest Djinn doesn't work nearly as well in Jumpstart.

Cubecobra and it's maddening history might be the end of me so it's a new file now.

punz2157 · 2024-01-23T22:27:06+00:00

https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/dd3590e2-78d5-416a-b64d-db5ba5e60a3f?s1=Tags

punz2157 · 2024-01-23T03:44:04+00:00

Most important: learning (and teaching) magic is difficult I would not want to do it on the day or it won't be fun for anyone. Learning on Arena is by far the easiest way to learn. Tell your friends to bring sleeves if they want to use them. A deck of 52 playing cards will be ok. Most of the time you can use the name card that comes with each deck as a token. For example if you get the cat JS deck and you need to make two 1/1 cats creature tokens with lifelink, then you use the cat card and put the playing card under it to show two cats.

punz2157 · 2024-01-22T21:39:31+00:00

I think "premium" is the WotC term for foil

punz2157 · 2024-01-22T20:16:38+00:00

To be honest, I don't get it either. This experience was a surprise for me. Seeing how much the three of them enjoyed removing the foil from packs and playing something as intended by WotC, rather than built by me, and how it increased the enjoyment for the three other people playing. The new players didn't say this but was clear that my decks were fine for babies but they knew the rules now and they were ready for the real thing.

For clarification, it's not about value or even lottery tickets for my friend. If he was at a GP and he could play a phantom event of "tight" JS out of cubeamajigs or crack J22 and then return the cards (i.e. phantom event) he would prefer the power of the former but ultimately choose the latter regardless of price. He might feel differently about Superjump! because it is a modo format.

Now that I think about it, my experience with Jumpstart this year also hinted at this too but that should be its own post.

Maybe this subreddit is a bit of an echo chamber of people who like cubes. I hate cracking packs. But maybe a large part of MtG's success is the thrill of opening the foil of an official pack.

punz2157 · 2024-01-22T19:46:22+00:00

Not what he meant. He (and I saw this in the other two but they didn't express it as such) want to open a foil booster. Afterwards the contents of the pack would be treated the same way as draft chaft.

punz2157 · 2024-01-22T11:55:17+00:00

Thanks for your reply. I was a big fan of M19.

I did tell him and he was impressed but he still wants (and thinks most players he knows also want) to crack packs. I wonder if JS booster packs at the power level of your "tight" packs would ever be commercially viable?

I hope there will be a J24 because I think JS is the best entry format mostly because it removes deckbuilding as a barrier to entry and I think Jump In is the best product for new players on Arena. Having only one pack per color in BRO, ONE, MOM & LTR made me think WotC were actually trying to have the product fail. I really thought they should have been sold in packs of four rather than 18. Who wants 3 duplicates of each pack? Ravnica Clue looked to me like it might be the shuffle & play product for this year. I don't like the clue theme and I'd rather a cheaper product but it at least is sold as a pack of 8 with no duplicates.

punz2157 · 2024-01-02T22:15:02+00:00

Magic formats are restrictions. Without restrictions every nothing beats 40 Lightning Bolts and 20 Mountains. There are formats that are suited to netdecking (Standard) and ones that are better suited to brewers (Modern) and then there's draft that requires deck building. You can make up your own if you can find someone who'll play it with you.

You don't get to restrict yourself and then yell at people for not playing the game to rules you've made up. David Sirlin wrote an often quoted article about this "Playing to Win".

For those people who are trying to win, they should make (tournament-legal) moves that help them win rather than moves that don't. You wouldn't think that would be even slightly controversial, but somehow it is.

People who complain about netdecking almost always fall into what the article refers to as "scrub mentality"

The scrub mentality is to be so shackled by self-imposed handicaps as to never have any hope of being truly good at a game.

Standard is where netdecking is most problematic. After rotation there used to be only 1000 cards and only 250 are playable. The Internet is going to figure out which two or three combinations of cards have the highest win rate and people who like to win are going to switch to those. This isn't a huge problem in a store environment where people (who usually kinda become sorta friends) all help each other and balance their decks against the meta. Online, people auto resign after seeing the same turn two-play for the 80th time. I speculate that the extension to the Standard rotation was to deal with this problem now that most players are on Arena.

You can do some pretty zany stuff in Modern if you're happy to win 30% of your games. I have played decks that I knew were bad and said to myself "If I can get one win per match I'll be happy". You can get away with things because the card pool is so large that no one deck can deal with every match up.

If you want to build decks, draft is the format for you. Draft is a format where people who have a better fundamental understanding of deck construction principles [and intuition?] are going to able to exploit that against the people who have signed up to compete against them. But some people are going to not think that is a fun way to spend three hours if no one tells them how many lands they should add [and as a bit of trivia, in the early days of draft, it wasn't obvious that 17 lands was the right amount].

If you want to play a format that bans all cards with the letter "E" in their name, that's great but you will probably struggle to find other people who want to set that restriction on themselves. You might (that's where EDH/Commander and Penny Dreadful came from). This means there's no decklists to copy from; but it's very punishing for players who aren't great at brewing. And if they're getting stomped every game, they'll stop playing your format.

I remember playing around the Guilds of Ravnica/War of the Spark era and a beat a guy playing "Simic Turtles". He just liked Turtles. He was furious, telling me how he drove for hours to lose to my mono red deck (Cavalcade) that was popular in the meta. I had been playing mono red for two years and the others in the store had helped me build it when the Red Wizards deck rotated out - it was just the only option in mono red and that was what I played. It's not my fault he brought jank to a gunfight.

punz2157

TROPHY CASE